A long road to guild puzzles

Well, after almost four months of running guild missions, we unlocked guild puzzles this week. It's been a lot of bounty hunting, rushing and trekking to get here. Obviously we're not a zerg guild, so we had to work that much harder every weekend to get our merits. There were some ups and some downs along the way. We basically went a few weeks back in March without completing any bounty hunts because people found it too frustrating (looking at you Half-Baked Komali, you bugged motherfucker).

Before I get into how the puzzles went last night, I just want to look back at the past few months and how we got here. In my last post I complained about guild missions and their high barrier to entry. While I still think it's unfair that smaller guilds are essentially locked out of missions, I want to give kudos to ArenaNet for developing the content, because it's really fucking fun. I can safely say some of the best times I've had with Vindictive in Guild Wars 2 have been during guild mission nights.

Below, I've put together a handful of screenshots from our most memorable missions over the months. In that time we've had new people join Vindictive and some old people move on from the game. But as you can see, many of the same people are constant throughout. I really want to give a shoutout to all the Vindictive peeps who've come out every night since the beginning. None of this would be possible without you.

Alright, enough of the sappy stuff. Onto the screenshots!

Here we are fighting Big Mayana in Sparkfly Fen. This was the first time we successfully completed a Tier 2 bounty hunt. It was like a fucking tsunami of cheers on vent when we downed her with about 10 seconds to spare.

This is a screenshot from the first time we got the Quaggan Paddle. Holy shit were we excited. We'd done about half a dozen guild rushes before this, but no dice on the Quaggans. And then we finally got it. Everyone's day was suddenly better.

This is a scene from our first guild challenge, Save Our Supplies. We failed it on the first try and a handful of people logged afterward. But Olcan really rallied the troops and convinced everyone we could do it. So we tried again, with fewer people — and nailed it. Major props to Olcan for this one.

The night before we unlocked guild puzzles, everyone got together to practice jumping. Above is a scene from Griffonrook Run, the last puzzle of the night and definitely the most complicated. Here we are trying to figure out what the fuck is going on as Zoned Out tries to lead us.

This is our first successful Crab Scuttle in Southsun Cove. The Crab Scuttle was actually the first rush we ever did way back in April, but we ended up failing it horribly. Being able to finish it last week was cathartic for everyone. Fuck you crabs. Fuck you.

Here's a group shot outside of the guild puzzle, Angvar's Trove. The plan was to get everyone to strip down to their undies and line up, but then Xai busted out the Fun Box. It pretty much went downhill from there.

And finally, we get to this. While I have a bunch of screenshots from the guild puzzle, this is my favourite. It's us stampeding toward the exit after we beat Angvar's Trove with a minute to spare. The last room bugged out on us, but after two resets, we got it to work. It was a huge relief and made the puzzle even more memorable. A hell of a night with a hell of a guild.